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1789 and After

1789 and After

Chapter:

(p.573)
24 1789 and After

Source:

Unacknowledged Legislators

Author(s):

Roger Pearson

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198754473.003.0025

This chapter summarizes the preceding account of the poet as lawgiver in post-revolutionary France under four headings: the poet as politician; the poet as champion of justice; the poet as moral and religious commentator; and the poet as officiant of uncertainty. Aspects of the public careers and literary works of Chateaubriand, Staël, Lamartine, Hugo, and Vigny are compared and contrasted under these headings and situated within a broader narrative in which the poet’s authority comes to be seen to derive no longer from God but from humanity itself, and in which the poet-lawgiver, forsaking direct political engagement, privileges poetry as an alternative and more effective legislation. Poetry ceases to be a tool of ideology and aspires to be a powerful independent instrument of moral progress, non-denominational religious feeling, and secular surmise about the meanings of life. The poet moves beyond melancholy and, anticipating Baudelaire, towards a positive poetics of conjecture.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 25 May 2019